Hide and Seek

Grace and peace to you from God our father, from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and from the Holy Spirit who gives us life. Amen.
(Reread Isaiah 64:1-9)
When we were little kids one of the games we used to play was hide and go seek. I am sure that you remember this game. Someone is designated as the person to be “it”. He or she count to 100 while everyone else goes off to find a place to hide. Then the “it” person would go and try to find those that were hidden. If your were “it”, it was always a challenge to find those who were hidden, especially those that were clever in their hiding places. Our first lesson from Isaiah is also concerned with hide and seek. It concerns the Israelites who have just returned from exile and find themselves persecuted by outside forces. For them this was no game and there was despair in not being able to find God. Despite this, there is reflected in these passages the expression of hope.
At this point I am going to do something that the professors at the seminary say that you should not do when preaching. I will be telling you about a time in my life when I too was looking for God. A bit of history. Although I was baptized when I was five years old, our family did not attend church with any regularity. By the time I was a teenager we were lucky if we attended the Christmas and Easter services. When I left home at 18 there was not even the thought of attending church. This changed 15 years later when Deb and I moved out to the Puget Sound area of Washington State and we began attending Pilgrim Lutheran church. Five years later in 1994, I went on a men’s retreat and recommitted my life to Christ. My life for the first year following the retreat was great. I had a good job with a nationally known restaurant chain, relatively low stress and was able to be involved in our church. I was in effect living on the mountaintop. Things changed when I was transferred to a different location, to the place that I called the “Store From Hell”. If anything could go wrong with this store it usually did. This went on for 10 months until I asked for a transfer to another location. And although it was initially a good move to make, it too became a place that became almost unmanageable. My stress levels rose, my frustration increased, and it was all that I could do to try to maintain some semblance of sanity. In all of this I tried to stay involved with the church, to continue to be involved in bible study and to keep meeting with a friend who was my accountability partner. Although I was doing all these things, I still felt like God had abandoned me. I wanted to scream out, “Where are you God ?!?!” “Why am I being punished?!” “What did I do that you are angry with me?” Like the Israelites I wanted to say “O, that you would tear open the heavens and come down so that the mountains would quake at your presence”. Like the Israelites I had returned from exile and had a hope that God would bless that return. Like the Israelites I now felt abandoned and wondered where God was.
Maybe you have felt like that at some point in your life. Maybe you feel like that right now. Maybe you have just been let go from your job and are wondering what is going to happen next. Maybe you are dealing with a chronic disease that saps your energy and will. Maybe you are coping with the recent death of a loved one. Maybe you are stuck in an untenable situation, whether it is with a bad job, or a bad relationship with a spouse, a parent, or a child, and it looks like there is no hope of resolving it. And you wonder, where is God in all of this? You might be asking, “Where are you God, now that I need you? You have done amazing things in my life in the past and now you abandon me?”
When I was in the middle of my restaurant crisis, as I wondered what it was that I had done, the self-recriminations begin to set in. All of the unanswerable thoughts began pouring out. Perhaps it isn’t that it’s God that has abandon me. Perhaps I’ve abandoned God. What was worse, since I thought God was no longer present; I began to act out my frustrations. I became angry at the smallest thing. If something went wrong, either at home or at work, I would get mad and start swearing, yelling and throwing things. My co-workers didn’t know how to react to me. I’m sure my family was at times fearful of their husband and father. To put it charitably, I was not acting like a Christian should act. According to the apostle Paul in Galatians 5, I was displaying some of the traits of those who are under the sinful nature, that is, idolatry, hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, and envy,” I definitely was not displaying the fruit of the spirit, which is “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control”. As it says in the Isaiah verse 6, I had become like one who was unclean and my righteous deeds were like a filthy cloth.
Patience has never been my strong suit. Frankly I was tired of playing hide and go seek. I was tired of being “it”. I was tired of having to live up to this Christian expectation. I was tired of living in this valley of despair. I wanted this experience to be over and to return to the mountaintop where I could easily find God. The text says in verse 5 that “no ear has perceived and no eye has seen any God beside you who works for those who wait for him”. We are in the time of advent right now. It is a time of waiting. Waiting is an active verb that requires a passive stance. Waiting requires patience. It means persevering in the face of delay or provocation without becoming annoyed or upset. Waiting requires trust. Trust in the promises that have already been made by God. Promises such as that made to Noah to no more to curse the ground. There was the promise made to Abraham to make of him a great nation in whom all families of the earth should be blessed. There was the promise to David to continue his house on the throne. There were the promises, made through the prophets, of restoration of Israel, of the Messiah, of the new and everlasting kingdom, of the new covenant and outpouring of the Spirit. In the New Testament these promises are founded on, and regarded as having their true fulfillment in Christ and those who are His. Waiting requires faith. Faith that something, anything, will change our present circumstance into something better. Look at verse 8. “Yet, o lord you are our father, we are the clay, you are the potter. We are the work of your hand.” This implies a relationship of the creator with the created. It implies that we have been formed out of dust and water to be made for a purpose. It implies that the creator can take that which is warped and reshape it for something more useful.
The apostle Paul writes in the book of Romans “Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” Our hope is the same of the Israelites. It is in the hope of a God who works for us. But it is also in the hope of a God who seeks us out. After all, we are his people. In this game of hide and go seek, it is God who is “it”. It is God who seeks out those who are hiding in the valley of despair and hopelessness. It is the God who finds us and as potter pours his love into our hearts. And so we wait. We wait for the expected Christ child, Immanuel. We wait to be reformed again to be useful to God and to creation. We wait to be touched again by the God of all salvation who is always with us, now and forever. Amen.
And may the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.